Spectrospheres

Sonic Sculptures

The Amsterdam-based creative music label Kraft Label commissioned me to design the artworks and visual identity for their new music release Various Abstractions 001. VA001 is a collection of tracks made by several Kraft und Licht residents and other local producers.

This series of album artworks show a collection of sonic sculptures: capturing the energy and spirit of each individual track on VA001 by Kraft und Licht. For each track on the release a spectrogram is created and transformed to a spherical shape. The geometry of the sphere is a visual representation of the track’s frequency, time, and intensity. This type of audio visualisation allows for the identification of patterns in the audio signal and can be used to reveal trends, structure, and other interesting characteristics.

Audio Fingerprints

Each song on the release is unique in its composition and energy, but even more so in the most low-level representation of each track, namely its data. As the artist I sought to use that what makes each track unique — its audio-fingerprint — as a starting point of my experimentation.

Signal Averaging

This series of album artworks captures the energy and spirit of the music it accompanies. It features a bold, abstract pattern of waveforms travelling over the sphere’s surface as the audio signal progresses over time. The design is a dynamic mix of audio-visualisation and generative design, using contemporary computational methods to synthesise shapes from sound. In the process of making these works, several techniques including artificial intelligence and shaders were used.

Finally, after all spectrograms and geometries were computed, a final algorithm was used to average all individual signals into a combined one. This combined signal tells us something about the EP as a whole, and as a sum of its parts, and was presented as the cover for the release.